Apotheosis

The living can always tell how the day is going to be by watching the sunrise. There's a certain light that it gives off, a specific telling of the shade that gives more vision than a soothsayers orb or an oracles opiates. It takes no learned man to tell it, its the feeling one gets when observing it.

This morning the signs were obvious but for the man viewing it it was more a sense of joy than fear. Others would have run screaming, their mind reeling at the sight of the horror and knowledge of their similar fate; but not him, for he found such things useful.

He watched as the first rays gently slid across the horizon, seeming eager to feel this new land till it touched the outskirts of the horror. It had seemed to be struggling against the smoke which seemed to blot it out, but even that thick charnel gas couldn't stop the persistent childlike light from its goal. It playfully illuminated the forms on the ground, the trees, the blood splattered across them. It seemed to jump and frolick across the broken bones, the routing muscle wrapped around steel tightly, showing even in death the defiance of those not willing to lose their own. It flowed through the gaping holes in chests and skulls, through flesh ripe and as yet unpicked, touching mouths open in screams or horror, a rictus of pain etching the features that could once have been handsome, but now were torn and bloodied. Small hands clutching the skinned remains of larger ones lay disconnected from their bodies, the rips ragged and violent.

The man, although barely a man he was, more like an adolescent, watched as his minions picked their way across the broken field, some cavorting amongst the dead, some with a slow lurching walk, all bearing their own versions of horror. Flesh hung ragged from them, their bodies dead a long time ago. More terrifying were those who bore no wound or scar, seemed to walk as fluidly as the sick light of the sun and drenched in the blood of their victims. Some of his minions eagerly tore at the dead, shoving skin, bone, muscle and organ into their slavering mouths. This all he watched, and was pleased.

He moved down from this higher ground into the field of the dead, his feet snapping bone and squelching in the muck. They had sent even their women and children against him in their last stand for survival, had seen the dead faces of their allies each take their turn in slaughtering them. They had been the last, had lost all their kindred and now would join his army.

The first sign of resurrection was evident in the corpses of the children. Skin started to reform, muscles reknitting and becoming hard. They stood up slowly, shaking their heads and looking innocently up at him. Only their teeth betrayed their death, yellowing and broken. Soon the other bodies began to rise, some as broken as when they lay stagnant, some made perfect and pure in death. Tongues lolled out of hungry mouths, some torn, some replaced with rolling worms and fanged apendages. On some the skin sloughed off, showing bare muscle and sinew. Copses exploded as their skeletons forced themselves out of their soft shells. All joined the walking dead of his army.

Ethliss smiled and walked on, his army following behind him. This land was dead and still he had not found what he was looking for. Time to move onto the next. With a swift motion of his hand he tore open a rift in reality and stepped through. Behind him thousands of dead moved through the hole eager to embrace others into their state of immaculate death.

The sun had risen by the time he was done, shining on a land devoid of life, smoking and barren, the only trace of his passing being a single hand, small and perfect in its childlike way, wrapped around the hilt of a dagger